PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES FOR DIALOGUE BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS
PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES FOR DIALOGUE BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS

Summary/Abstract: The editors of a recent Cambridge publication offer a rationale for their title – the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy – which the given title of this essay allows me to finesse, by coupling “Arabic” with “Islamic” (Adamson and Taylor 2005). For, while Arabic served the Islamic intellectual world much as Latin did the medieval Christian world, the fact remains that Arabs today account for but twenty percent of Muslims and a considerable portion of Islamic intellectual tradition has been forged and transmitted in other languages, notably Persian, Urdu, and Bengali. Indeed, key intellectual figures in Islam have themselves been Persian, sometimes composing in both languages, as this itinerary will make clear. So “Islamic” offers, I believe, a more comprehensive cultural descriptor, and I shall reserve the adjective “Muslim” in this narrative for the faith-component of Islam. One could, in an analogous manner, employ the term “Arabic” ethnically or culturally. It is that tradition which I shall trace in this proposal for a fresh review of the phases Islamic philosophy displays in its ongoing attempt to bring Qur’anic revelation into conversation with rational strategies inherited from Greeks and Persians. That intentional conversation is best called “philosophical theology” and its context, “Islamic.” Indeed, part of the fresh story will show how religion, which in the Muslim world focuses on practice, becomes a path leading to understanding, long taken to be the province of philosophy. The shifting relations among these axial notions will mark our journey’s itinerary. [...]

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